John wrote to show that Christ was
the Messiah, the Divine Son of God.

When
Judas had left them, Jesus said, "Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is
glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in
himself, and God will glorify him at once. My children, I will be with you
only a little while longer. I give you a new commandment: love one
another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.
This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one
another."

“I
give you a new commandment: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also
should love one another” (Jn 13:34).

The
magnificence of God’s good creation is enigmatic. The first chapter of the Book
of Genesis recounts God’s mighty acts of creation – from the light and the
heavens to the earth and all of the creatures in the sea and on the earth. God
views all of His creative handiwork and in litany-like fashion, the sacred
writer reveals that “God saw that it was good.” God does not create useless
junk. Yet for all its beauty and magnificence, all of creation apparently is –
one way or another – “wasted” in time.

Still,
we cannot but rejoice in creation. Psalm 104 provides a wonderful remedy to a
wary soul. The psalm begins with “Praise the Lord, my soul” and then proceeds
to describe the reasons for joy by enumerating God’s creative handiworks. “The
Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment; he stretches out the heavens like
a tent… .” Even inanimate creation comes alive in the melody of the psalm: “He
makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants” and “at your rebuke the
waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight; they flowed over
the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for
them.”

The
psalmist continues with the divine gifts that lead to man’s nourishment: “He
makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for people to cultivate – bringing
forth food from the earth: wine and gladdens human hears, oil to make their
faces shine, and bread that sustains their hearts.” As the psalm moves to
conclusion, we are reminded of the absolute dependence of creation on the
Creator (the words have become the basis of a familiar devotional prayer to the
Holy Spirit): “When you hide your face, they are terrified; when you take away
their breath, they die and return to the dust. When you send your Spirit, they
are created, and you renew the face of the earth.”

But
nature also seems to waste its beauty. From the depths of the sea to the
expanse of wilderness only a small fraction of it is ever viewed or appreciated
by man. One need not seek the wilderness to behold the beauty of nature and to
observe the inherent “waste.” Inching through the details of a backyard yields
something similar: the construct of a blade of grass or a dandelion or the
lighting of a blue jay on a tree branch all have details that even a master
artist can only hope to simulate.

What does all
this “waste” reveal about the nature of God’s love?

In
the Book of Exodus, we hear of the Lord feeding the sojourners with manna, the
mysterious “bread from heaven.” The Israelites were instructed to “gather as
much as they (needed)” and, as a result, “the one who gathered much did not have
too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little. Everyone had
gathered just as much as they needed.” Further, Moses instructed them not to
hoard and when some of them kept part of their gatherings until morning, it was
wasted – “full of maggots and began to smell.” God gives in abundance to
sustain us, but He is willing to spoil His gifts when we fail to trust in His
continuing generosity.

Christ
provides us a similar lesson in the parable of the rich fool. The ground of a
certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. In an effort to “take life easy;
eat, drink and be merry” he plans an early retirement by building bigger barns
to store the surplus grain. He trusts in himself, not in God’s continuing
generosity. Instead of recognizing his abundance as God-given, he fails to take
the opportunity to be generous himself. The grand finale of the parable should
be sobering to anyone too fixated on IRAs or other retirement plans and
elaborate retirement schemes: “But God said to him, ‘You fool This very night
your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared
for yourself?’ This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for
themselves but is not rich toward God” (Lk 12:20-21).

The
lessons should be clear. God desires that we trust in His loving providence.
Reliance on God’s gifts is a day-to-day and a moment-by-moment virtue. As
Christ advises after the parable of the rich fool, “Do not worry about your
life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is
more than food, and the body more than clothes” (Lk 12:22).

But
we should also respond in kind to His generosity. From natural creation to
Exodus to the parables of Christ, we see how God “wastes” His love on us in
order to teach us not only to trust Him, but to imitate Him by “wasting” our
love on others without counting the cost. Our lives and all of creation are
made for generous and “wasteful” – perhaps more accurately, sacrificial – giving
of self in imitation of Christ. “For greater love than this no man has than to
give up his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). That is precisely the wasteful
kind of love Christ means when he says, “As I have loved you, so you also should
love one another.”